A Chinese Ishmael and Other Stories

Edith Maude Eaton (1865-1914) was an author best known under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far. She had to leave school at a young age to work in order to help support her family. Nonetheless, the children were educated at home and raised in an intellectually stimulating environment that saw both Edith and her younger sister Winnifred (1875- 1954), who wrote under the pseudonym Onoto Watanna, become successful writers. Eaton began writing as a young girl; her articles on the Chinese were accepted for publication in Montreal's English- language newspapers, the Montreal Star and the Daily Witness. She asserted her Chinese heritage and wrote articles that told what life was like for a Chinese woman in white America. Her fictional stories about Chinese Americans, first published in 1896, were a reasoned appeal for her society's acceptance of working-class Chinese at a time when the United States Congress maintained the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882- 1943). Her works include: A Chinese Ishmael (1899), An Autumn Fan (1910), The Bird of Love (1910) and A Love Story From the Rice Fields of China (1911).